S A E M
NEWSLETTER
Newsletter of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Specialization and Emergency Medicine: Being Comfortable with Who We Are The practice of emergency medicine requires broad clinical expertise—emergency department patients include all ages, and suffer all types of illness and injury. Roger J. Lewis, MD, PhD Furthermore, emergency medicine practitioners are increasingly involved in the maintenance of public health and surveillance for bioterrorism and other significant epidemiologic events. The “practice” of academic emergency medicine includes not only the breadth of clinical activities mentioned above, but also includes bedside and classroom teaching, administration, and research. Regardless of an academician’s work ethic, intelligence, or the (often outdated) expectations of the university’s promotion and tenure committee, it is simply impossible to be equally knowledgeable, skillful and productive in all clinical and academic areas. In this column, I will explore the conflicts which can occur among emergency physicians when some practitioners work to develop specialized expertise in narrower areas, while others take pride in their breadth of expertise. I recently attended my twenty five-year high school reunion. During that reunion, one of my former classmates gave the following toast: “Here’s to being comfortable with who we are.” I found this toast to be both simple and insightful—simple in its acknowledgement of how much nicer it is to be in one’s forties than in the midst of a perpetual adolescent crisis, and insightful in suggesting that many of our irrational and self-destructive behaviors as adolescents reflected, in part, a lack of being comfortable with who we were. With this in mind, and with the hope of gaining insight into our own behaviors, let’s consider who we are as academic emergency physicians. We are clinical generalists first and foremost, with a subset of us choosing to gain additional specialized clinical or academic skills. These specialized skills might include clinical skills (e.g., toxicology, pediatric emergency medicine), administrative skills (e.g., EMS), or research skills (e.g., clinical research, epidemiology, laboratory research). As an aside, I believe the acquisition of specialized skills generally requires fellowship training, but not the availability of a sub-board exam in the area of interest. Over the last several years, emergency medicine has suffered from at least one internal conflict regarding the roles of (continued on page 16)
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November/December 2002 Volume XIV, Number 6
SAEM Research Fund Appeal to Members – Time to Put Our Money Where Our Hearts Are SAEM members have recently received a letter requesting their financial support for the SAEM Research Fund. This member appeal letter is just the first step in what we hope will be a campaign that produces exponential growth of the Research Fund, and leads to our goal of providing numerous high quality research training experiences for emergency physicians. The importance of member contributions to the Research Fund will be outlined below, but first a quick review of where we have come from, and where we hope to be in a few years. About a year ago the SAEM Board of Directors approved the following mission and vision statements for the SAEM Research Fund: MISSION • To improve the care of patients in the emergency department and pre-hospital settings, through medical research and scientific discovery. • To enhance the research capability within the field of emergency medicine through financial support of investigators. • To enable investigators to gain knowledge and skills related to: the responsible and ethical conduct of research; research design; funding mechanisms; practical aspects of data collection, management, and analysis; and the publication and dissemination of new information. VISION Our vision is that well-trained, ethical, and productive investigators will conduct emergency medicine research. Because of their knowledge and contribution, emergency medicine specialists will be involved in the planning and conduct of virtually all research related to emergency medicine, whether the research is investigator-initiated and supported by federal, state, or local agencies, or initiated and supported by industry. Some of the principles that were part of the strategic plan for the SAEM Research Fund were that the emphasis of the Fund will be the support of training grants, that these grants will not be directed to a specific area of research and are open to all members who seek research training. The expectation is that SAEM would need to initiate a major development effort with the goal of building a well-managed endowment that could fund the following numbers of grants by the year 2006. • Research Training Grant: 3 per year • Institutional Research Training Grant: 2 per year • Scholarly Sabbatical Grant: 2 per year (continued on page 2)